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Peace of Movement Jogging South Lumpkin sidewalk, cars sprint ten miles over, gusting past, even when the wind naps — but I'll find the silence, or reopen, so quiet will slide inside. Slow, my pace, while I open the unnoise — nerves and pulse ease, each foot gently striking, then a green voice whispers in pedal C, motion is life, tone felt not heard — audible to only the oldest elephants. Middle School Our most direct route home took us past Old Man Peterson's peeling-white clapboard house, where he and his body filled an old wicker porch rocker, passing judgment both on us and the 1960s. Too noisy, Too loud, he yelled as we stuck out tongues and raised fists — incitements both to his rage and our laughter. One more thin purple stream bursting on the red map of his nose — penciled by a lifetime of alcohol and anger. But Peterson was a numerical constant in an algebraic universe of divorce and abandoned moms. An unknown, that never needed solving, regardless of our route home. Generations I know, sky without sun, landscape absent green leaves, no balls thrown, bike rides, Pop Warner, no Dad. Father, you liked fishing, a gene on the lone Y, as I stood streamside pole in hand Unseen. Raw clams, no oysters left, our one meal together, trains leaving the Grand Central bar, half full. Broken, PTSD, Mom, wife two, a victim, the son collateral damage, scars itch. Daughters, smiling and grown, despite so many doubts, demons surfacing and then slain, progress. Barbeque We're strangers here I say to the folks seated at two tables one holding half the sheriff's department of Turner County, the other, a local preacher, and two pewter-haired congregants. No staff, no service window, we're flummoxed. The Preacher turns, Y'all order outside at the window, but tell 'em you're eatin' inside. Our stomachs had rumbled to empty and consulting the modern Delphi, Yelp, we found Ashburn, GA's Keven-A-Que, that earned four point six of five. The polar vortex had set up his easel and now painted a chill 34 Fahrenheit. Passing back through a paint-chipped door , we ordered ribs, chopped pork, fried okra, and potato salad. Keven's a remnant of better times, spinning mills, honest money for melons and peaches. Food arrives over our left shoulders — hickory fumes spiraling upwards from melmac — meat unctuous as a used car salesman from Crisp County. In politeness, we swallow belches — barbeque after all. Preacher turns, Where y'all from? My wife says, Athens — we teach at Georgia — the bond instant. Conversation flowed: the frost-etched winter — failed peach pollination, delays in peanut planting. We agree the best potato salad has just enough mayo to glue onion to tuber. Dinner done I turn, You can't find good potato salad just anywhere these days. Preacher looks back, Ain't that the truth of it. Lost and Found Drawer, End of Season, Memorial Park one dime, three nickels, many pennies; lip saver, cherry flavor with hearts; rubber bands - thick blue, thin tan; two black pocket combs; keys, three house, one Jeep; half roll of Rolaids; one jar tanning butter; one can - pepper spray; three unopened tampons; one plastic multicolored lei; one blister pack - birth control pills; two leather wallets, empty; two condoms; one copy Anna Karenina; one yellow rubber duckie; one water-stained letter in rose ballpoint beginning If you really loved me. Gary D. Grossman enjoys sharing his poems and essays, published in 70+ literary reviews. His graphic memoir, three books of poetry and gourmet venison cookbook all may be purchased via his website or Amazon. Gary enjoys running, fishing, gardening and playing the ukulele. Website: https://www.garygrossman.net/

The afternoon was foggy. I took five Percocet instead of one when my medicine was due. My left arm was so swelled when I moved it I had honest-to-Jesus worries it might bust open. The doctor had already said yesterday if the steroids didn’t work he’d have to do a flaying procedure to keep me from losing it completely. “Flay sounds bad,” I said to him when he told me. “Where’s that leave me?” “A significant part of your arm,” he said, “will be gone. I’ll save what I can, but it’ll be noticeable.” But things were noticeable already. Soon as something were to give one way or the other with my arm, I intend to jump to my stories. The computer tower on a desk at the foot of my bed has not been turned on for three months. The last thing I saw on the monitor was a page of a Word document, except that page of prose was for a story called “Discount Paint for Houses,” one of my favorites, looking back. I wanted to get back to writing my stories, but the arm was for sure a problem. The doctor’s appointment had been a week ago with a follow-up set in the next couple of days, but I should have called them. I didn’t have a phone, though. Or television, for that matter. Only the house, because also no car. A lot happened to bring all that together at once, and that’s why I stay inside my stories as much as I can. But there has been help. I walk to my grandmother’s house every few evenings, so I could go there to call the doctor. Then I could borrow my aunt’s truck and go to the appointment. After all that’s done, I’ll could come back here and wait for the painkillers I hope the doctor gives me to start working and write my stories. The person who had been my third wife had split a few weeks ago. She left me three months behind on house payments, and also left an SVU that was hers that was repossessed a few days after she drove off in mine. It had all been building to the point that there was no reason to even get into all that was wrong around this time. It was just all wrong. I would lose the house a month after my arm cleared up with a second round of steroids. And after had been the hoped-for pain meds. And the beer, when I could borrow money to get any and find a way to a store to get it. It happened more than you might think. I stayed high and drunk enough that I could still write sharply but not sober enough to fall into the black mouth of an odd pseudo death. Now I can understand that I wasn’t trying to do anything except write the stories. If I could get out of my head a little and get in front of that computer screen and compose, then I let everything else go. When I started to worry, feel guilty, panic, get depressed, cry uncontrollably, cry in pain, cry from guilt, fold inward on myself, I turned on the computer monitor and pulled up whatever story I was writing and floated. It was all wrong and it was all strange. “Discount” had been a good story. It took me out of the world for a good spell. But it wasn’t the one I most remembered writing around that dark-as-a-crow’s-wing time period. I remembered writing what ended up being the title story of the collection, which would eventually be published, one called “The Same Terrible Storm.” But the individual stories mattered less than the whole of the stories themselves, the collective final gasps of one life passing away and the uncertainty if another would take its place. “Storm” was sad, like all my stories, and exactly as all my novels would be in the decades to follow. But I kept at it; I wrote my stories to keep from going slowly insane, even though they were sad. Sad, sad, sad, all the way down. / It was about a week after a crew came and repossessed the doublewide that I moved in with my Aunt Jimmie. Her Auxier Heights apartment had no light fixtures. Aunt Jimmie had bought five or six lamps, the tall kind, not the old-fashioned ones. She had them in the corners of each room so that the light was always at a low level and always seemingly dimming lower and lower. It wasn’t all bad, the lighting. With my computer on it gave off a nice glow like a white-flamed fireplace. It was calming and made writing that much better. It was another week when I got my first story rejection in the mail. “That’s just one person’s opinion,” she said, raising her chin in the air and sweeping her long, Old-Regular-Baptist hair defiantly over her shoulder. I didn’t say different, because I supposed she actually wasn’t all wrong. I started to develop false hope. I stopped being a writer and became a participant in the literary race of which I’d always had the highest level of disdain. Soon, Aunt Jimmie started asking if she could read my new stories. Or maybe the collection of stories she’d mailed out for me. How could I say no? She read the collection and brought the stack of pages into my bedroom and dropped it on the bed where I lay reading. “Don’t know what you expect trying to get rich with stuff like that,” she said. It was as disappointed as I’d ever seen my aunt. And she’d been through some difficult times in her life. Ex-husbands who were exes because they had beat the shit out of her, like the first, or slept around with everybody she knew, church friends, everybody, like the second one. Had it been her hopeful imaginings of my stories somehow selling and pulling us from the world of poorly lit rooms in Lego apartment buildings checked by HUD inspectors every month? Yes, it had been exactly that. I made a pot of coffee the morning after she tossed the manuscript aside like a stained shirt. I asked her to give me some ideas for jobs and took a careful sip from my cup. “Write your books,” she said, her eyes shining more spirit than usual. It had happened before, someone telling me to make a living as a writer without knowing precisely what it meant. It’s no one’s fault, all those who do it; they’re only speaking from a place of love or encouragement, but it’s a difficult goal to achieve. Instead of answering in some way that would insult or hurt her feelings, a smartass reply, in other words, I said for now what I needed was just a job. My career path would have to wait. This made sense to her and then she offered up a dozen or more options for plain old jobs. When she was done, the suggestion to try to get back with the newspaper was the best I’d heard. I had been thinking about it myself, so I borrowed her ’83 Ford pickup and drove to Pikeville, home of the Pike County News. / A strange thing happened, though. After I landed the job (a new publisher had been hired, so the interview involved a lot of catching him up), I gradually began to regret it. By the time I was back to Aunt Jimmie’s, I was sure I’d made a bad decision. So now again I had to let her know without making her feel bad about her advice. What I let her know was that when I wrote for the paper before, it was a high-stress job for not much pay. And it still wasn’t much pay: a mere ten dollars an hour. I told her I would do better to get a job at McDonald’s. I’d seen on their sign they were hiring at eleven dollars twenty five cents an hour. She was astonished, more or less, about the pay rate, but still insisted it would be easier to take a job I already knew I was good at rather than jump into fast food, which she personally knew to be a beast in ways difficult to explain. I took the newspaper job and showed up the following Monday, worked two weeks, and studied my pay stub. It was all I needed to see to understand I would be staying with Aunt Jimmie for awhile, and she was okay with that. Still, it was a good job for a man eviscerated. The first week there I finished three stories. Each one longer than the next. I wasn’t crazy about it. I always liked to hit about five or six pages on a story and then, boom, the end. It’s called a short story for good reason. I thought of stopping once. Maybe things had improved enough that I could and get back to a normal writerly routine. But I didn’t, and the pages kept adding up. At one point, I thought I might have started a novel, but that wasn’t it. I could have called a couple of them novellas, by definition and accepted phrasing in the writing community. But I never liked the idea. If it’s not a short story, it’s a novel. And on the fringe, there are poems accidentally becoming short stories. It went like this for a long while, me spending any extra time I had only writing. I can’t imagine how I was able to do it and not stay constantly guilty or worried. It was easy at the time, being so self-absorbed. Maybe I felt I deserved some decisions made just for me. I’d been through a lot. But I still planned to make more of an effort to at least spend some of my free time with Aunt Jimmie. I finished enough short stories for a book, a collection of stories. All of them except maybe two were really solid. I could tell, and I wasn’t surprised. I had always done better work when broken down into my most fundamental parts, either through bad relationships, addiction, depression, or circumstances exploded from bad decisions like supernovas born out into the mess. I printed four copies of the manuscript at the library and Aunt Jimmie mailed them out for me. I had her keep a tally of how much it cost in postage so I could pay her back. “That won’t be a bit of a problem when you get one of them books published and make a million dollars,” she said after getting back from the post office. She wasn’t trying to insult me. The comment sounded sincere, and probably was. The everyday person had a point of view, I believed, that if somebody had a book published that it was an achievement so rarely made that there must be some kind of incredible reward. A movie contract, Hollywood at your beckon call, mansions like Stephen King’s. Basically, Aunt Jimmie and a lot of other people thought getting a book published resulted in the same thing that happened to King. Instant millionaire, books everywhere being read by everybody. And you couldn’t explain and really manage to completely shake them from the idea. I let Aunt Jimmie think that, yes, if I had the book published, I would buy her and myself mansions in whatever state we wanted. She wanted so little, even for daydreaming. Only a comfortable home. One with three bedrooms, all made up nicely as guestrooms for visitors to have a place to rest and sleep that was as comfortable as their own at home. She wanted to decorate those rooms with nice pictures on the walls and little antique washstands with bowls white as snowflakes in the corner beneath a fancy mirror where her friends could check their faces and hair after washing. “Wouldn’t they just do that stuff in the bathroom?” “Not in my fantasy, Vince,” she told me. And I swear I thought I could see tears in her eyes. / I probably knew Aunt Jimmie’s real story better than anybody. Her first husband began dating her when she was fourteen and he was twenty-five. The man had every intention of grabbing her young and raising her up like a hunting dog to serve him in whatever ways he desired. By the time she wrested herself away from him, she was seventeen and shared with this pedophilic, weak excuse of a man a sickly son. They divorced when the boy was two, and the man only spoke to the boy three times after that to tell him all three times that he never wanted to be a dad. Less than a year later, she and her son moved in with a man closer to her age. But he was a troubled, abusive alcoholic, and beat her regularly, while spending his Friday paycheck on alcohol and women. By this time, she’d had another child, a little girl this time, with the younger man. She and her two children nearly starved in those years. Much of the first year after her little girl was born, there was only a bottle of water mixed with sugar for the baby and a jug of spring water and the occasional loaf of bread and stick of butter for her and her son. All three grew malnourished, moved month to month when rent came due, and Aunt Jimmie eventually lost them both to child protective services. That was the end of her first life. When the children were taken, she dropped from the family map. Everyone had their turns trying to find her, tracking her once as far as Idaho only to see the trail go cold a week later. When she came home, she was transformed. Not as a new woman or a stronger person or reinvented with a renewed passion to reunite her family. She returned a spiritless person, a woman whose soul had suffered a splintering death and left her empty in all respects. However, even a spiritless person must eat, and Aunt Jimmie eventually took a job. She hitchhiked to work while saving money for a truck, bought the first one she could find for three-hundred, and kept working. From then to now, I’ve only ever known of her, outside of rent and utilities, to buy food. She has worn the same clothes all my life and bought only one pair of Justin boots, good and sturdy, the kind, if taken care of, could last twenty years or more. Aunt Jimmie’s stories were the kind that shatter stone, hard beyond measure, close enough to Hell they could boil water, and so constantly heartbreaking it could jerk a tear in a glass eyeball, as she put it. “Music got me through a lot of it,” she said one night. “Not sad music, but songs from the Eighties. Fun songs, you know? They made those back then. Cindy Lauper, Culture Club, Billy Joel, and, oh my, Weird Al. They just go on and on. None of this grunge punk the world is a bag of shit and my life ain’t fair bullshit Nirvana and just all that morose, I-hate-everything bunk.” “Yeah, just good fun music,” I said. I’d never heard music during that time talked about that way, yet it was so true. Money for nothing and chicks for free? How could it get any lighter and more laid back? Some nights we made up fun songs, new takes on old classics. Other times we listened to 107.3, a local station that played Eighties music. Africa, Billie Jean, Let’s Hear It for the Boys, Micky, Puttin on the Ritz. Fun songs, fun stories, all stories meant to make people feel good, aimed at entertaining, not preaching. That old music led to Eighties movies. Footloose, The Breakfast Club, The Outsiders, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Fletch, dozens of those old King Arthur flicks popular back then like Excalibur, the best of them all. We listened, we watched, we built our barricades with stories offering open arms, replete with good hearts. And other than her grudge against dark, introspective, nihilistic music, Aunt Jimmie never really complained, not in the way you might expect, not mantled in self-pity or in constant search for pity from others. Our talks were venting sessions, ways of saying aloud what could hardly be believed or survived otherwise. Misery loving company. We were anti-Hallmark cards, anything but uplifting and pleasant reminders that there were people in the world walking about with good, open hearts. / In the evenings I had free, we ate supper in the living room and talked about what could be, what we hoped for whenever circumstances improved. It was the fantasy exercises again. But we were both fine with it. Aunt Jimmie insisted before she shared any more that I say what kind of house I would want. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted a house, not necessarily. I’d had a doublewide, a nice one with three bedrooms, two and half baths. “I might want a two-story log cabin, but one of those real sharp ones. Chimney, big fireplace, some of that old rustic looking stuff in the kitchen like a brick oven and a hood vent, big sinks with those faucets that you can move around.” “But you don’t cook.” “I could learn.” Aunt Jimmie started expanding out from houses. She talked about places she would go, places besides the Smokies and Myrtle Beach. Paris, London, Hawaii, those places. Every so often while listening I had to remind myself that these were her dreams, that I shouldn’t say a thing against them. Even if I did want to tell her that I’d heard Paris smelled like piss all day and all night. “First I’d hire somebody to take me to those places, though,” she said. “I get lost going two hours to Lexington. I’d never make it to Hong Kong and back.” We were slipping off into a seductive arrangement of dreams, not fantasies. Fantasies were safe because they were so far from reach there was no risk of a rising hope coming to the surface. Dreams were just enough to inspire ambition. And ambition, if not guided by absolute clear-sightedness, would unquestionably end in disappointment. Dreams were too close to a common enough realm, too tangible, too possible. For the hopeless, nothing worked better than the unattainable constructs of a strong fantasy. “Why not become an emperor and have your advance team plan, take you, and accommodate you on any travels you’d want to do?” I said. “Emperor. Yes, that’s a fine thought,” Aunt Jimmie said. You could see by her grin she knew what I was thinking. Having a new car or finding a good-paying job were for the others, people who already had means. Those were plans, not the elaborate worlds we could pull from thin air. “Ah emperor,” she said again, feeling the word on her tongue. “I wouldn’t be a dick emperor, either. I’d kick the highfalutin folks out and bring in the good old guys and gals. Have parties with all that fun music of ours. I’d have a full theatre built onto the house. Not a theatre room. I’m talking about the big screen. Projection booth and all. Have a concession stand free to all.” She was on a roll. “I would go for the subtle, though,” I said. “What’s that mean?” “The big prize stuff like a lifetime — no, wait — lifetimes of peace and comfort. Days where all the little things go right, days after days of that. Red lights turning green at the perfect time, your work slipping into a flow so natural it no longer feels like labor, communicating perfectly with the people you love, the people who matter.” I stopped and put my hand on top of Aunt Jimmie’s. “People like you, Aunt Jimmie.” It was late. What was left of supper was cold on the stovetop. “Tell me more about the subtle, big prize stories,” she said. And so I did. Over the next several months I became a skilled revisionist and even better at complete overhauls. We took our worst days and compared them to our best days, we pulled threads of memories when small things went well, hundreds and hundreds of these brilliantly luminous threads, and created a future that reposed perfectly in spacetime. I also spent time during those months writing new stories. They came easier and hurt less and maybe they were not better for it, but I enjoyed it. Aunt Jimmie even wrote a couple stories. She had one or two based on some of those Eighties songs, and they were pretty good. I suggested she send some out, see if a journal or two might pick them up. “These ain’t for other people,” she told me. “Just like them we tell each other at night, these are for us. It’s not everybody could appreciate our stories.” I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, that it would be for the ones who needed them the way we did, because I knew in the truest rooms of my heart that all of this, as far as Aunt Jimmie was concerned, was for me and her. It was our thing, the hard work of our own imagination down in the fray with us against empty refrigerators, dead-end jobs, rickety vehicles, t-shirts ten years old or more, words foreign to us like vacations and savings, real-world mysteries like health insurance, retirement, and new car smells. And when it was all in fantastic sync, we used our thin-air worlds to tell each other how it would be, how genuinely and routinely good it would be without ceasing and for all time. Everything was still only the stories, like it never would be again. Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer and novelist from Kentucky. His novel, Oblivion Angels, is currently nominated for both the Chaffin Fiction Award and the Weatherford Award. The Independent Fiction Alliance named his novel, Alice, a 2023 Best Book of the Year. His collection, Fallujah Boy and Other Stories, is set for publication in May 2026.

Melinda screamed, hot, forceful breath scraping her teeth. She was doing what she was supposed to, that’s how aggrieved mothers behaved. “You want your baby to die, asshole?!” The voice on the other end of the call was deep, distorted–a deadbeat Darth Vader. Offended, Melinda wanted to scold Scott for taking things too far, his inclusion of “asshole,” but much like her screaming, there was a protocol to follow; he was just doing his part. A “fuck” would most certainly be coming next. “You want your fucking baby to die?!” Scott’s warbled voice got high, his words overlapping, stapled together in an audial slap. Melinda wanted to nod, having guessed the raised verbal stakes. Still, instead, she looked to the officer sitting on her chewed-up ottoman, its stuffing spilling out, reminded Melinda of certain girls in Daisy Dukes, skin sneaking free. The cop made a swiveling motion with his hand, keep talking. She wondered if he might also like to tack on an “asshole” to this gesture, emphasizing the importance of her essential part in solving such a lurid crime. “Are you still there, shithead?!” Man, Melinda thought, Scott was nailing his role as kidnapper. They had spent the last two weeks practicing, every night after they finished closing, turning the lights out at their respective jobs, him at Shakey’s and Melinda at Chester Cheeseums. They’d come home, more tired than a dog after pushing out a litter, and go over the minute details of the plan, finishing their nightly preparations with a little game of kidnapper-victim improv. Sans profanity, Scott had been consistently strong during rehearsals and though Melinda had been weak at the start, trying to force tears rather than staying in the moment (“Babe, that’s, like, improv rule number one,” he’d remind her), she got stronger as the nights wore on. But what were the specific tweaks Scott told her to implement, Melinda wondered with that deep voice stabbing her brain. Touch myself! she remembered, wanting to snap in ascertainment, but she tamed this urge because moms of kidnapped children ain’t snapping, they’re holding themselves, looking for comfort like a bleary-eyed pup searches for the teat. “I want my baby!” Melinda cried and shot a hand up toward her neck. Her aim was off and she accidentally dragged her fingers up across her right breast. The surveying cop squinted, bemused. Melinda saw this out of the corner of her eye and course-corrected by pulling at her throat. “You gotta sell the anguish, baby,” Scott had repeated during their rehearsals, stinking of grease and sharp cleaning agents. “Please, sir, please! Just tell me what to DOOO!” Melinda said, beginning to rub her neck. There was a hunger in her voice that sounded sexual, the kind of tone meant for fumbling across soft rugs, but she figured that as long as it was impassioned, it would work. “Here’s what you’re gonna do…” The deep voice cooed. Hearing indecipherable crunching sounds, Melinda brought the device closer to her ear despite the loudness of the speakerphone, rapt, as if she had no idea what was coming. She felt proud of her sharpened performance, proud of her husband for being such an instructive, guiding teacher. “You’re gonna hand over $10,000 and leave it in the arcade of the San Sarita Mall, by the pinball machines in a white trash bag. Got it?!” “Yes! Yes!” Melinda’s performance was getting more raw and primal, so much so that the officer turned his gaze to the floor. But she couldn’t help it. This was the closest she had felt to Scott since the arrival of their child, Scooter Jr., now barely 12 months. It had bothered Scott that his son’s name practically rhymed, but Melinda got the privilege of naming him after her father, Scooter Senior, since she’d be doing most of the rearing while Scott provided and spent most of his off-hours rehearsing. “Any craft is a muscle,” Scott’d say, calling her late at night, telling her that he and Clifton, his theatre buddy, were working out their violent and visceral interpretation of Coriolanus, honing their breath-work. “You won’t believe this stage combat,” he’d say, his grin stabbing through the phone. Melinda had wanted to ask what that meant and why the San Sarita Community Theatre had yet to announce a production of Coriolanus. But when Scott came to her with this plan, his big blue eyes pleading, Melinda forgot all about that, for once feeling included, and her questions ran down the drain, much like the speckled mop water after chipping away the hardened cheddar off the Chester Cheeseums floor. The “kidnapper” continued his demands. “And you’re gonna do it tonight, you got that, you fuck?!” Hurt, Melinda flashed her eyes at the verbal assault, and she thought to protest until realizing she was naturally reacting as someone in distress would, shrinking under cruelty. “Is-Is my baby alright?!” She was going off-book. In the outline, at this point, Melinda was supposed to have agreed then hung up. But wasn’t that improv, allowing for the unexpected? Plus, Melinda wanted to know about Scooter Jr.’s well-being. “Uh, he’s fine, but this little bitch will be deader than a Christmas tree in July if you don’t pay up!” Melinda turned to the cop with a grimace, big and “cheesy”–one of embarrassment rather than fear–but what could she say, the acting bug had never properly bit down upon her. And that was why Scott had come to her, waking her in the night with his hair mussed and his eyes wild. Scott explained that there was this prestigious acting workshop he’d been admitted to, the hallway light cutting across his face, making him as beautiful as the day she met him in that parking lot–defined features, particularly the jawline–asking Melinda if she needed help carrying her super-sized bundle of toilet paper. (“It was on sale. I don’t have a medical problem,” she had added.) Cause her real “problem” was just how much she loved Scott. And that night of pleading, in their cramped bathroom, Melinda’s love held and Scott utilized a “stage whisper,” shower running, as he described the kidnapping, the burner phone, the $10,000 ransom coming from his parents, middle-class retired folk who hoarded their life’s earnings should a medical emergency arise not because their middle-aged son might attend some silly acting workshop in Albany. “They’ll shell out for Scooter, though,” Scott had said. Melinda barely knew her in-laws. They were quiet around her, but also quick to critique her physical appearance. “Is that…” Scott’s mother once said, sniffing around Melinda. “Muenster cheese in your hair?” It was. Melinda often left work with a morsel stuck somewhere. But it didn’t bother her that Scott’s parents cared little for her. Instead, she understood their chillness and frugality and why their son would sooner hatch a dummy plan to kidnap his own wriggly baby instead of asking them and their cutting glances outright for money. Melinda screamed again, this time to release, feeling more tense every second, especially with the officer right next to her. Next came the sought-after, scene-selling tears she had hoped for. “I’ll do whatever you say! Just don’t hurt my baby!” She couldn’t wait to hold her son again, cradle him in her brawny arms, the constant cleaning her main source of exercise. Then the tears became a product of joy as a feeling of congratulations swelled within her. Melinda was part of a family unit, a mother and a wife, and when it counted, when she was needed, she proved she could show up. The tears were also because of her pride in Scott, who was succeeding in achieving his dreams. It would be hours before they secured the bag of cash from Scott’s parents and even longer before Scott, pretending to have to go to work despite the kidnapping, picked up the money at the mall. He had been employed there years ago and knew to enter and exit through hallways rarely used, adorned with antiquated security cameras that collected more spider eggs than any real footage. And Melinda, the horrified, distraught mother, would be driven to the entrance of their town to find baby Scooter Jr., snug in a basket, dressed warmly by his mother. But no one would put that together; the San Sarita police were under investigation for snorting speed faster than they confiscated it. Once Scooter Jr. was back home and Scott returned early from “work,” their fictitious hell would be over, and maybe it would make for a sensational, captivating story, tragedy with a happy ending. “Are you still there, asshole?!” “I’m here! I’m here!” Melinda was giving the terrorized performance of a lifetime: clutching herself at the biceps, squinting through dripping tears. She only hoped that money and the acting workshop would help Scott feel fulfilled, as fulfilled as she felt screaming for the well-being of their baby. Grey Traynor (they/she/he) is a transfemme writer who has been published in XRAY, Time Out SF, Beacon Quarterly, Gold Man Review, Doubleback Review, and BULL. They attended the 2025 Tin House Summer Workshop and they read at the 2025 Portland Book Festival. They're currently querying manuscripts. Find them on Twitter/Instagram @greytraynor and at www.greytraynor.gay

A fog does not roll in. Rain does not fall, does not soak the earth until suffocating worms rise, blind and glistening, to be met by opportunistic birds. When she opens the door, it does not creak. The air is very still. Dust does not rise. As she steps inside, the floorboards do not groan. Nothing moves. The house is so well behaved. Walking through the old, empty hallways of her childhood, she feels no cold spots. It's amazing, really. You wouldn't know this place was haunted, if not for all the ghosts. She can hardly wade through the crowd of them. They linger in doorways and recline on the couch. Some are seated politely at the kitchen table. Others stand at windows, looking out at an unfamiliar world. They are all her, of course. Slight variations. Discarded drafts. The one who never moved away. The one who married too young. The one who was brave and followed Jenny Barnett to college. The one who never answered the phone. The one who did and wished she hadn’t. They are everywhere, soft and overlapping. The silence of all of her unfinished sentences. At the end of the hallway, there is a door that should not be there. On the other side of the door is a desk where a single ghost sits, writing. This one looks up, smiles. Her face is older, calmer. “You made it back,” she says. The ghost signs her name, their name. The others begin to fade. Not gone, but gathered. Slipping into her. Filling the empty rooms beyond her ribs. Outside the rain begins at last. Soft, certain, and real. Whitney McShan is a Texas native who lives outside of Austin with her wife and son. Her work has been featured in Hellbound Books Anthology of Horror, Instant Noodles Lit Mag, and the upcoming anthology With Teeth. She is interested in the strange, the uncanny, and the monstrous.

The Box arrived on a Tuesday. This already upset most of the planet, because everyone knew that if something important ever came from space, it should at least have had the courtesy to show up on a Friday evening, when people had nothing better to do. It didn’t land in Washington, Moscow, or Beijing. It didn’t hover above the pyramids or land itself on the White House lawn. It simply appeared, without warning, in a small car park behind a shopping mall in Milton Keynes. At first, people assumed it was an art installation. The box was black, smooth, and entirely unhelpful in shape or purpose. Soon, scientists arrived, followed by journalists, followed by the sort of people who always seem to show up whenever something “possibly alien” happens: the man with a clipboard, the woman with too many crystals, and at least one person claiming to be half-reptile. For three weeks, humans did what humans do best: they argued. Was it dangerous? Was it a gift? Was it a bomb? Was it, as one local newspaper suggested, “a very advanced fridge”? And then, one morning, without fanfare, a thin slit opened in the Box. Papers began to spill out. Thousands of them. Sheets of alien stationery, each written in crisp, oddly polite script, and all translated perfectly into Earth languages. At the top of the first page was a neat title, underlined twice in blue ink: “Feedback and Suggestions: Earth Branch” The scientists expected equations. They expected alien blueprints, star maps, maybe a universal cure for death. Instead, the first letter read: To: HumansFrom: Mars Hello, neighbours. We noticed you’ve been sending satellites over here. Most of them crash, sputter, or get stuck spinning around like a drunk mosquito. We just wanted to say: they’re terrible. Please send better ones next time. And stop calling us “dead.” We’re very much alive, just shy. The second letter was shorter. To: Humanity in General From: The Galactic Noise Complaint Office Please turn down your televisions. We can hear them three galaxies away. Nobody needs that much reality TV. Then came a rather long one. To: Sir Isaac NewtonFrom: Point Black Hole Orbital Minds, Beta Lyrae We admire your work. Gravity was a nice touch. But we should probably tell you something: you’re not human. You’re one of us. We misplaced you in 1642 during a cargo transfer, and you landed in England by mistake. Honestly, you did well for yourself. Please come home. P.S. You were never supposed to invent the cat flap. That was an accident. There was also a note for animals, which confused everyone even more: To: Earth WhalesFrom: The Republic of Enceladus Dear cousins, we see you’re still stuck with humans. That must be rough. Hold on. We’re working on a petition to get you relocated. Stay strong and keep singing. We hear you. By the time the first hundred letters were read, it was clear:The Box wasn’t a weapon.It wasn’t a gift.It was a complaint desk. The scientists were no longer arguing about the purpose of the Box. Instead, they were now competing to see whose field of study got insulted the most. The next handful of letters didn’t even mention humans: To: Earth AntsFrom: The United Swarm of Zeta Reticuli You’re doing fine. Honestly, you’re the best species on your planet. Keep it up. P.S. Humans copied “cities” from you and then had the nerve to think they invented it. Don’t worry, we noticed. To: Earth PigeonsFrom: The High Council of Altair Please stop walking in circles near statues. You’re interfering with our navigation systems. Also, we intercepted several of your signals, and frankly… they’re offensive. To: William ShakespeareFrom: The Bureau of Interstellar Literature We quite liked your plays. The comedies were decent, the tragedies better, but the histories… dreadful. Also, that “to be or not to be” line? You borrowed it from us. One letter appeared to be directed at someone not even born yet. To: A Girl Named Priya, Age 9, in the year 2087From: Department of Cosmic Cartography Please stop doodling galaxies in your schoolbooks. Every time you do, we have to adjust an actual galaxy to match. Its paperwork is a nightmare. ------ By now, it was obvious that the Box was not going to hand humanity the key to the universe.Instead, it was handing humanity a long list of one-star reviews. The next stack of letters came out thicker, heavier, and somehow more judgmental. To: HumanityFrom: The Ministry of Reality Checks, Planet Thark-12 Why do you believe invisible sky-people control your lives? We invented gods once, too. Then we got bored and moved on. Try hobbies. It’s healthier. The letter caused a priest at the reading to faint. It made three atheists laugh very loudly. To: Planet Earth,From: The Ulthior We don’t understand politics. You argue for centuries about who gets to sit in a chair, while the chair itself is on fire. Please reconsider. To: Adolf HitlerFrom: The People of Hyrants Terrible job. Absolutely terrible. Your ideas weren’t even original. We tried fascism thirty thousand years ago and got bored in a week. By the way, a moustache is not a good look. You should have stuck to painting. At this point, a group of people in the audience started whispering furiously. One of them suggested perhaps the Box should be destroyed, because history, after all, was their job. To: Earth EconomistsFrom: The Fungus Kingdom of Deneb-F8 Money is imaginary. You’ve built your entire species on numbers that don’t even exist. We tried the same system once. Ended with everyone owning the moon, twice. Good luck. By now, the crowd around the Box was growing restless. Some laughed, some shouted angrily. The Box did not reply. It only released another letter. By the fifth week, people no longer came to the Box expecting answers. They came for the entertainment. Reading the letters had become a kind of global sport. News channels ran them live, betting agencies gave odds on what the next complaint would be, and teenagers made memes within seconds of each new release. The Box, of course, didn’t care. It just kept spitting out notes. To: The United NationsFrom: The Tree Council of Rigel-7 You are very proud of your “flags.” We don’t understand this. You wave colored cloths around as if the cloth owns the land. We have no flags. Our land owns us. Please stop stabbing each other over fabric. To: Earth PoliticiansFrom: The Wind Guild of Arcturus Stop pretending you are leaders. You are not leading. Please update your job titles to “professional excuse makers.” You are being dragged behind events like a sock tied to a spaceship. This one went viral online in less than five minutes. Thousands of people changed their LinkedIn bios to “Professional Excuse Maker.” Several politicians tried to sue. By now, protesters had begun camping outside the Box. Some demanded it be destroyed because it was “alien propaganda.” Others demanded that it be made president, for it spoke more truth to the people than any other president ever had. To: Humanity’s Military LeadersFrom: The {..}{..}{..}{..} Federation of Kepler-186f Your wars are embarrassing. Single-celled organisms on our planet conduct battles with more strategy. At least they divide properly. You just destroy things and call it “honor.” By this point, people weren’t laughing as much. Some were angry, others were uncomfortable. A few cheered. Most just sat in silence. The Box hummed. Another letter slid out, a single shiny letter, stamped with authority. It was for India. Everyone gasped. Even Trump muttered, “India got the shiny letter before me.” Letter from Alien Citizen “X9zq42k” of Planet 7510238751-7 To: The Election Commission of India Subject: Kindly Remove Our Names from Your Voter List Dear Humans, It seems our citizen “da346ss3f” has been listed as someone’s father in your records. He is not a father, just an asteroid miner, currently mid-divorce. Please don’t complicate things for him. We also notice a voter named only “.”, and a house number listed as “0”, which makes no sense since “.” Never voted for the BJP in the Indian elections, and “0” is dead. Lastly, 7510238751-7 has no interest in your elections. We eat meteor dust, not manifestos. Kindly remove our names; your democracy is fascinating, but it is yours, not ours. Intergalactically yours,X9zq42kPlanet 7510238751-7, House No. –-==-[] When the letter surfaced, BJP leaders called it “fake news,” but somehow also claimed it proved their “Desh Videshee program” was working. Modi gave a speech saying, “Even beings from other galaxies trust our vikas.” Then came the biggest one of all, a letter glowing brighter than the sun. People thought it was a holy sign, some new scripture from the heavens. Priests, pandits, mullahs, popes, all rushed to claim it for their own. But when it was finally read, the words were brutal: To: Planet Earth, Concerning Religion From: The Arch Librarians We counted that you have 4,200 religions. Impressive. But none of you ever considered the possibility that you’re all wrong? We suggest combining them into one large religion called “We Have No Idea.” You have not understood God. God is not your idol, your statue, your temple, your war cry. God is not who you kill for, nor who you pray to for power. You carved stone and called it divine. You built religions and called them truth. But the truth is simpler: the divine was never outside you; it was always within. You fought over illusions.” After the last words were spoken, it was silent for a while, perhaps too long. The black box shut its little cat-flap and disappeared. It didn’t fly away; it simply vanished. The aliens had believed that showing humans an outsider’s perspective of their planet would make them better. But almost everyone forgot about the black box. No one spoke of it. And now, some people are using it as a plot for their short stories…

My smartwatch says ‘unknown number,’ but I know who it is. ‘Good afternoon, Lydia Charles,’ I say, reciting the manual. ‘Tracey, Pete here, time for a quickie?’ I look around the train carriage. It’s silent. There are eyes in books, eyes out the window, and, now, eyes on me. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Sure?’ Pete says. The manual outlaws ambiguity. ‘Of course, Pete,’ I say. ‘What you wearing?’ He says. ‘Office clothes,’ I whisper. The bespectacled old man in front of me looks up from his newspaper. ‘Office clothes?’ I look down at my jeans and hoodie. ‘Blouse, skirt, tights. You know, what I usually wear to the office.’ ‘I do know what you usually wear to the office, Tracey, but you’re working from home today, aren't you? Just wanted to check you’re sticking to the manual.’ His caustic breath corrodes my ear. I picture his gnarled smile, his expensive teeth. ‘Of course, Pete,’ I say. The train screeches. I jam my phone into my hoodie, suffocating the microphone. The old man points to the no-speaking sign. All carriages are silent now - better for on-the-go productivity. ‘What did you have for lunch today, Tracey?’ Pete says. ‘Salad with chicken breasts,’ I say. A young woman from across the aisle catches my attention. She taps her smartwatch. She holds up four fingers - which I take to mean it’s 6.56pm (four mins to go) - and then raises her fist in solidarity. I wonder if she’s going to the protest too. ‘Grilled?’ Pete asks. ‘Yes,’ I say. Pete hates unhealthy food. Bad for the body. Bad for the mind. Bad for Lydia Charles. That’s what it says in the employment manual. ‘Made extra last night,’ I say, knowing Pete also knows how long it takes to grill chicken breasts and we only have 30 minutes allotted for lunch break. ‘Thinking ahead,’ Pete says. ‘Very Lydia Charles.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘So you knew you were going to be feeling ill today?’ Pete says. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I just always make extra to save time.’ ‘Of course,’ Pete says. I shove my phone into my front hoodie pocket as deep as my belly button. The train doors beep open. The young woman holds up three fingers. ‘Well, thanks for pushing through today Tracey,’ Pete says. ‘It’s very appreciated, what with Maya and Gilbert off too. Although Gilbert still sent in a report from the hospital, which I have to say, is very Lydia Charles.’ ‘Very,’ I say. ‘Maya, on the other hand. Well, who am I to say when you should stop grieving, but it’s not very Lydia Charles to mope forever, now is it?’ Hmm, I murmur vaguely. I don’t want to say ‘No’ and put Maya in it, but I can’t disagree with Pete. I’m already on one strike for the time I picked up my daughter during work hours. The manual only allows time off if a dependent is ‘unwell,’ not if they’re ‘upset.’ ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite hear you there, Tracey?’ I think of Maya. I think of my daughter. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m glad you agree, Tracey,’ Pete says. ‘It can’t go on, can it?’ His breath rolls out of my phone like chlorine gas, silently choking my humanity. The new passengers are staring at me. Two workers and a woman in her 70s. Likely a Super Spender given the way she vigorously points to the no-speaking sign. I hold my index finger up, pleading for one minute. The young woman across the aisle holds up two. It’s then I see him: grey-haired, brow-beaten, paper in hand. It’s less common since the Directive, but I used to always wonder about begging on the train. Is it worth the cost of the fare? Is it better in cold weather? Do you target certain lines or parts of a line? ‘Tracey?’ ‘Yes, sorry’. ‘I said, do you think I should give her one last chance?’ I look at the unemployed man shuffling up the carriage. I picture Maya in the same outfit. I wonder if she’d follow in her husband’s footsteps and commit suicide rather than face joblessness. ‘That would be very Lydia Charles of you,’ I say. ‘Yes, you’re right’, Pete says, cheerily. I exhale slowly. The young woman holds up one finger. The old man shakes his head, but I point to my watch. Even the over 70s - the retired Super Spenders - know the 7pm cut-off. But so does Pete. He’ll wrap up on time like he always does. ‘Any plans for the evening?’ Pete asks. ‘I’m ill,’ I say. ‘Ah yes, silly question. Well, I’m off to the theatre. Got tickets to the monthly advertising forum. I imagine you’ll be tuning in, what with being stuck at home and all.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Also my daughter is 15, so she’ll be watching it as it’s…’ ‘Excellent, very Lydia Charles,’ Pete interrupts before I can say ‘compulsory’. ‘Have a good evening, and see you in the office tomorrow. Bonne nuit.’ I sigh, my mouth so dry it tumbles into a cough. The old man shakes his head. The young woman raises her fist. The unemployed offers me his resumé. Beetle is a UK-based copywriter with a weird name. When he’s not writing words for other people, he likes to write weird, funny and dark short stories - mostly about everyday people in unusual situations or unusual people in everyday situations.

If you decide this story is incoherent, I want the world to know I have a constellation of three freckles under my wrist from when I had anorexia. Are three stars even a constellation? I want to say so. All of the daily shots made a discoloration, where it used to be calm, fragile, and new under there. Maybe it’s incorrect that the freckles came from illness, which changed my body forensically, but when I look back, I want someone to know I find it true. & so, it is a tale as old as time, the looks I used to judge others with. A saccharine kind of arsenic, the way I teased and whispered down the subway trains in NYC: that could never be me. My love would never leave, I’d spit like a candle flame, not realizing I was holding a candle. Flames catching. My sister’s hair caught on fire on her birthday, the happiest day of the year for her. Her 21 extra chromosome not mattering, the smattering of green icing because she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, blending in with smoke and flame. Everyone was okay, but my friend and I just screamed. And at least I had her that day, arm in arm, knuckles white, to let it all out, in the falling apart– we reacted the same way. Even on a birthday on St. Patrick’s day, luck evades– Even the happiest of things/days/moments/loves blows away. You told me I was beautiful the day my grandma died from dementia, the act of losing herself. The rain pelting on my face, my hair in a messy braid I needed to sever- I loved you at that moment, but I knew it was one-sided. A dice that will not roll right–but I loved you anyway. Clunking, jolting, moving back and forth from where I’m standing to daydreaming, to wondering, to gravity bringing me down, holding that leash, watching you walk away, wondering if we were going to be something. Now we have a son, and we’re falling apart, and was it worth the weaving? Your ribs near my stare. The haphazard streaks of pitting us together, peeling apart our cores, creating the best son in the world, then watching us fracture? You know, my grandma, she used to know how to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch. She didn’t need a recipe, and they would turn out fluffy, perfectly made. I knew love kept her recipes in her head. She remembered all the ways she baked for others, maybe not remembering their names, but remembering how it felt to knead something. In the end, I couldn’t visit her, wanting to preserve our conversations that were already memories. She told me how to use conditioner right when she saw clumps in my hair, she told me about puberty, she said she would never leave. We all fold into two truths and a lie, eventually. And so I learned, love makes cowards of all of us. I did the wrong thing. I should have gone and recited the recipe. Flour, mix in with the wet ingredients (tears are okay), and add in extra sugar. We used to sneak brown sugar like fiends– I’d whisper to her, if I could go over reality again with a fine-tooth comb. Rake my hands down her face for days. Wanting her to stay, withering. I cup my hands to your face one more time and already miss your voice. The gravelly husk, the way you smoked and paced outside on cheap balconies and saved your paycheck for rainy days that never came. Tell me lies, I say. One truth. I love you. I’m leaving. I’m staying. But I know love doesn’t stay in when penned. I cocked my brows when you said you had to go, pen digging into my knees, ready to scribble the words I want to remember, thinking not again. My mom kicked me out when I was 21. I lived in ten places in two years, which changed me. This was before I met you. I told myself: never again will I go place to place. Memorizing countertops that didn’t matter in the end. Trying to do the dishes the way each family liked, but each family did it differently. I still don’t know if knives are up or downward facing because it was different everywhere I stayed– Even silverware makes no sense anymore. Other things that confuse me include love that’s begging to be lost. I say, I love you. You dwindling, favorite-way-to-be-taunted type of ghost– Get going. Even if you haunt me. Leslie Cairns is a writer from Denver, CO. She grew up near Buffalo, NY. She was a former Pushcart Prize nominee ('23, '24). She has two chapbooks out with Bottlecap Press. She enjoys writing about mental health.

(TW - Sexual Misconduct) Amma narrates the legend of Honamma for the millionth time as you make your way to the temple. Last week, a sharp ringing of a bicycle bell interrupted the tale as a man in a tattered turban ran his rusty vehicle into a mould of freshly laid dung. “Chi!” Amma pointed to the slush on her feet. The man flashed dirty dung between his legs. Your hands froze, your heart sank to your pit, you even forgot the Sanskrit mantras. You looked for gorges, rocks, waterfalls to disappear. Cracks didn’t open, mountains, rocks, streams, weren’t in sight. At home, you chastised Honamma, for not helping, for making you feel dirty even though there was no muck on your feet, and you practised swinging the three-pronged Trishul like Goddess Honamma. On sunny afternoons, when shadows moved on the floor, you turned into her, wearing a beautiful saree, and you used your pretend weapon to strike the Rakshasa, just as your mother told you. But on moonlit nights, when shadows on the windows looked like scary faces, you shrank under your pillow and repeated, “There’s no Rakshasa” over and over, like a prayer. You continue to wield the Trishul, chant mantras in your head until you reach the market where Amma stops to buy flowers for the temple. No turbans or cycle bells have alarmed you so far, and you almost heave a sigh of relief when a bolt of lightning stings from down below and courses through your entire being. Dread catches at your throat, while the intense pain and overwhelming shame surge towards your eyes. “Sorry.” A man in a well-ironed checked shirt stands next to a woman with a sparkling nose stud. She and Amma greet, smile, exchange words while the checked-shirt man smirks. As you head into the temple, the hymns have jumbled in your thoughts, you seek comfort in Amma’s saree, unable to find the armament, unable to find the will to fight, unable to look the man in the eye and burn him into ashes. A gigantic Rakshasa sculpture stares at the entrance. Its bushy moustache and sharp teeth stained in red send a chill down your spine. You drag Amma away from the Rakshasa, but her devotion to Goddess Honamma is beyond the grime. She mutters fervent prayers as bells chime in chorus, you see the checked shirt, menacing beyond the silhouette of the demon. Heat rises on your cheeks as you lace your fingers together, you pray to Honamma for a Trishul one final time, because the Rakshasas have escaped the temple. You refuse to join Amma the following Friday on the pretext of exams. She waves, warns you to lock up, stay in, and marches ahead. You wait until she disappears around the corner when Srini, the boy next door, jumps in front. You hold your chest, laugh. His eyes graze the road as he takes a step forward. “Did you watch the film on TV last night?” His lips twitch. A familiar alarm spreads across your chest, but Srini is the one with whom you played hopscotch, shared comics. “A great film,” Srini says as he places one foot in. A voice urges you to force close the door, turn in the latch. “Let me in.” Srini’s hand pushes the door open. A sinister tinge of red spreads in his eyes. His dirt-encrusted nails dig into your shoulder, and his incisors glisten in the afternoon sun. Is Srini a Rakshasa? You open your mouth, but no sound escapes your throat. Your feet can’t move. The trident, the mantras, wither into grainy nothingness. Tears pool, anger swells because Honamma has failed you. Again. You look here, there, everywhere, for something. Anything. And you see it. A glint of light. She is bright, in a brilliant green saree, holding a Trishul adorned with flowers. Honamma. Amma had pasted a picture on the door last week. Srini’s shirt flutters in the wind, and his breath scorches your neck. Your hands shake, images move, cycle bells ring, and through the haze, you feel the clasp of cold metal in your palm. Honamma had pierced the Trishul through the Rakshasa’s chest, killing him and slurping every last drop of blood from the floor so there could never be a Rakshasa. A volcano erupts in your pit. Rakshasas have to be tamed, beaten, and killed. You tighten the grip, steel your knuckles, raise your arm, land it in his gut. His eyes skitter, and he doubles over in pain. You stand your ground. Gasping. Shaking. Srini holds his stomach, droops his head. You grit your teeth, shove him. He bows, walks away. You thank Honamma with a nod. She smiles. You unclench your fingers, and retire to your room. Sudha Subramanian lives in Dubai with her husband. Her work appears in JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Centaur Lit among other journals. Her debut novel, The Invisible Lines, is due for release in 2026. Sudha is a tree hugger and an amateur birder. Connect with her on IG @sudha_subraman or on X @sudhasubraman or on Bluesky @sudha.bsky.social

Everything changed in a microscopic moment. It was between when the anesthesiologist began the trickly drip-plop-drop of propofol from the IV into my bloodstream, and waking up, I believe. I came to, on a gurney behind a curtain like a bedsheet. The world sounded different. Everything looked the same, but there was an ineffaceable ring tone sound. It was dull and distant, an unbroken bloop—like the noise electric stovetops make when you set the pan down wrong on a burner. The discharge nurse brought me my papers, and everything seemed as usual. Except, the last page said: DO YOU AGREE THAT FAILURE TO PAY YOUR BILL MAY RESULT IN DEBTORS’ PRISON AND/OR SERVICE IN A WORK COLONY? I wasn’t even able to choose. There was only a box, with the reply already Xed out: YES ⌧ I left the hospital and saw a man begging for change right on the corner. This man didn’t have a typical beggar’s look of grizzled prophecy; his clothes were moth-bitten, but clean. “Please,” the beggar said, “I need money to buy back my daughter. They keep her in the Basement. But they don’t let me work!” I was about to ask the beggar what the “Basement” was, but he was interdicted by two flatfoots—cops dressed not in their perennial navy blue, but attired all in black, their glossy boots better suited to goosestepping than patrol. Both the black-clad beatcops grabbed the beggar, one cop at each elbow, and started carrying him off. “You can’t do this to me!” the beggar screamed. “How can I get the money to get her out if I can’t even work?” One of the cops took out a black aluminum tire thumper and walloped the beggar over the head. I heard the sick crack and gush of a split skull. The cop who’d swatted the beggar didn’t smile, didn’t even appear to be able to emote, but the other one grinned as he squatted down next to the beggar: “You ain’t supposed to get her out. You ain’t supposed to earn money. You’re supposed to listen.” I don’t think the beggar was physically capable of listening any longer; the metal tire thumper had rendered that faculty obsolete. The black-clad beatcops saw me and I ran. They laughed and laughed, and in between their hooligan guffawing, they took wild, swinging kicks at the ribs of the beggar, whose head was pink and red and who didn’t move other than when he was kicked. I passed several intersections, and at every one I saw black-clad beatcops listening to their two-way radios, all of them staring at me, smiling. They began to yell, “The Basement!”, or, “No payment, send him to the basement!” I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t want to know. And then I saw a door hidden behind an alleyway dumpster. I opened it and ran inside. But my feet didn’t find the floor. Instead, I fell—and I kept falling—down, down, down, into the deep, deep dark. Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids. His recent work has appeared in Flash Phantoms, Maudlin House, and Trembling With Fear. His last novel, A Boy's Hammer, was selected for inclusion in Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2022.

We returned to our house on a dreary Wednesday morning. Gossamer wings were on the porch, scattering now and then with the wind. The house hummed a low tune, a mournful lullaby, almost as if it remembered everything. And if it remembers, it must be grieving too. I was a lost child. Invisible. Lonely. The Icarus who never touched the sun. I screamed at the world to carve a place for myself. I trashed rooms and spoke vicious words. My thoughts often morphed into a parasite that took my will to live. I hated mirrors. Every reflection is a childhood I grieve, where sadness and loss were masked as a sacrifice. I wanted to be loved. The mirrors haunted me at night. When I got too close, I saw a small child darting across, its laugh bouncing off the trashed room. I lingered closer only to see myself, smaller with unblinking eyes. Her shoulders weren’t curved inwards like I remembered. Her lips were soft, innocent to sharp words. I looked at her with both pity and longing. The mornings would wander on, and when the sky bled orange, I would crawl back into the cursed room to find myself. When daylight broke, I would find myself on the floor surrounded by dead moth wings. Yesterday, she questioned me. I said this feeling I have is inexplicable. A dull ache where my heart should be. I have once again gone out of my way to feel pain and not this perpetual state of numbness that follows me. Each night, the mirror beckoned me, and I saw my past displayed like a bruise on glass. The moth wings grew in number, and past and present moulded together. She smiled when I frowned, moved when I was still, her eyes were innocent while mine were clouded with anguish. I reach towards her to be swallowed whole. I feel the cold and dirty ghostly veil that separates us. I drift from mirror to mirror. My wings aching for the light I’ll never have. Every mirror, every shard of glass, every polished surface lured me into hoping for a self I could never have. I stayed for a flicker, and my wings grew heavier, dulled by the pull of what I can never hold. The floor below me is scattered with moth wings, pale and brittle. Fragments of myself that I gave up for every longing, every desperate attempt to be better. The house hums a low tune with the wind. I drift through the hallways, today, tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that. Every day, I keep looking for my lost self. Stephaniya Elizabeth George is an 18-year-old university student who enjoys writing sad prose and poetry. She often explores themes of emotion and self-reflection in her work. Some of her poetry has been published in Zoetic Press. In her free time, she’s usually taking a walk to the beach or doing funky drawings.

She guides a party of four across the room to her last open booth and offers menus, before weaving back—table to table to counter—never empty-handed. Delivering a check. Clearing food-stained plates. Depositing empty wine glasses into a grey bin behind the bar. Not one wasted step. Setting down a steaming platter. Replenishing water. Whisking away tablecloth crumbs. Her eyes scanning for needs until all is settled just long enough for her to pirouette. Shimmy past the discreet powder room arrow. Prance down the hallway. Toe a wedge of wood to prop open the backdoor. She slips a cigarette out of her pocket. Lights it. Drags deep. Exhales one long breath of smoke up to cavort, like mist, with the full moon. Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press 2021), contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024. Her writing/photos appear in variety of journals.

Down and Out with Lady Luck in a Casino Last chip She is both faithful And unfaithful Until proven otherwise. Which risk do you take? Trust her and be wrong, Or doubt her and lose something real? In the end, the gamble, Winning—Keeping, Is about what happens if you lose... What loss can you bear; Everything, Or everything? In My Backyard When a frog realises there’s a world outside the well, it instantly separates itself from the crowd. The crowd only starts looking at it weird when it croaks about what it has seen. And here you are, not only croaking but attempting the climb. Of course nobody relates. But fuck it. The point is getting out, not making them believe you can. Blunt A rational empiricist with an anti-dogmatic orientation. Values logic over sentiment, observation over ideology. Challenges collective delusion and pursues structural truth beneath social fashion. Don’t ask for my opinion if you’ve already chosen your answer— Because I will give mine. Just saying The worst kind of sin is Machiavellianism—not for the harm it does to others, but for the desolate truth it reveals about the one who harbour’s it. To cultivate the will to manipulate and control, to plot with cold precision, and yet fail at it—does not make you less of a sinner. It makes you worse. A failure even in the realm of the damned, A Penumbra of a shadow who can’t even execute the exploitation they’ve so carefully woven. A Joke in the darkness. A loser, not absolved by mercy, but undone by their own incompetence. Not cleansed of sin, Just rendered incapable of it. Still life, a random day There is a crack on my screen. It has been there for days, maybe weeks. I cannot remember when it arrived. I look up from my phone. From the chair near the door To the bed across the room. The Starry Night, a cheap Amazon print, Rests against the carved wooden headboard. It sinks into a scatter of pillows and folded linens. A plush toy lies on its side. A metal bottle leans against an ashtray. The bed carries all of it without complaint. The power cuts out. My battery blinks a warning. This room is not connected to the inverter. I stay upstairs anyway. The electrician rewired something the wrong way. Still, I keep writing. If the words matter, maybe the lights will return. They do. Softly. The room shifts. The water bottle on the bed means I have been thirsty. The old aftertaste is familiar From nights I slept dry and did not bother to fix it. It feels like a small measure of progress That I drink now. The plush octopus I bought for my Lady Sits with its face folded. She loved it because it could show both moods. Happy or sad, depending on how it was turned. Now it is flat and unreadable. I cannot tell which side it wants to be. She is still with me. Only distance keeps her away. She would scold me if she saw it looking like this. I am not sure how it happened. Maybe I pressed it in my sleep. Maybe I never noticed. I could think about the crack on my screen, Trace its beginning, But the truth is simple. I probably tripped. The mundane collects itself. The room continues breathing. Life moves, quietly, whether I do or not. I Learned It From a Song Shoot me down, then soothe me with that soft little “sorry, honey” and expect me to wake up. But I did wake up. I woke up hard. Reality stung clean through. Lies tasted sweet for a while, but sweetness spoils. It wears off. It shows its rot. We fight, we make up, and I pretend it is repair. But underneath it sits this sly stack of stored poisons, all those quiet insults and hidden intentions you think I do not see. Trust is fragile. Once it cracks, it never sets right again. Fix what? The issue? Not the issue. The pattern. You are dependent on it. An addict of your own loosened values, a slattern for the chaos you create. Mayhem. A loose cannon. A bruised woman who drifts emotionally, selfish and crude. A broken clock pretending it still keeps time. All talk, no movement. A rude truth choking me until I cannot even pretend to reason with it. You can only delude. “Sorry for messing up.” Messing up? No. These are not accidents. This is choice. Shoot me down and whisper sorry again, and ask if I will wake up. Do you really need clues? Make up what? The ugly? It lives in the marrow. Ingrained. We can fight, and we can make up, but you snapped the link in the chain. That link was everything. I have never been unhappier. Thank you for showing me the peak of what I never want again. I am not even sad. It was expected. I think I smelled the truth a long time ago. It reeked. Creativity, practice, identity. Fuck. P.S. Art, I am over you. Yours, Artist Doge Kamki is a writer from Arunachal Pradesh, India. Drawn to the strange intersections between humor, doubt, and quiet revelation, he writes about the absurdities that shape everyday life. His work has appeared in Metapsychosis Journal, Redrosethrone, and Poetry Potion.